The Queensland election is likely to be a new high-water mark for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.
Photograph: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

As the owner of a racing-car parts manufacturing business, Ken Lowe is in the outwardly enviable position of helping “build dreams” for a niche market of well-heeled customers.

But it’s been a rough ride for the past two decades, he says, since “the government set out to slowly put us out of business”.

Lowe, based near Queensland’s Willowbank raceway, west of Ipswich, once had five employees. Today he’s a one-man show. He is “scared to death” a cheaper overseas competitor will start making an item of which he’s currently the only manufacturer in the world.

Lowe leans to the political right but feels deserted by a federal Coalition government that, in championing free trade deals, seems to be “working for somebody else but not for us”.

He, along with “many people I know that are in business today in Brisbane and the Gold Coast who are sick of both [major] parties”, will vote for One Nation at the next state election. It’s not so much a protest vote as “a desperation vote”, Lowe says.

Ken Lowe says he will vote One Nation at the next state election in Queensland. Photograph: Ken Lowe

“People in business, they’d vote for a dead kangaroo if they thought it was going to fix some of the problems. Whether Pauline Hanson is the answer or not, she’s the only one out there screaming the message everyone is listening to.”

Polls and pundits alike point to a Queensland election likely this year as a new high-water mark for One Nation.

“I think it’s going to be bigger than 1998,” a former senior conservative politician who saw first-hand One Nation’s capture of 11 seats in the state election that year, tells Guardian Australia.

And in Hanson’s home state, there are signs One Nation support is spreading among business owners and white-collar professionals for whom a return to protectionist trade policy is a less pressing concern.

The owner of a construction company, who asked not to be named, says Hanson’s newfound appeal has dominated talk among his friends in recent months at their local pub in a leafy, wealthy enclave on the outskirts of Brisbane.

I can tell you now these people are not struggling

Queensland construction boss

All bar one of his peer group of about 20 “middle-to-upper middle class” people, which includes “lawyers, accountants, a mining engineer, a developer and a butcher”, look poised to vote One Nation for the first time, the entrepreneur says.

They’re not troubled much by questions about the economy or free trade, he says: “I can tell you now these people are not struggling.”

It’s other Hanson talking points that have won them over: the folly of pursuing even the Coalition’s “absurd” renewable energy targets; the need to do away with Safe Schools; and winding back politicians’ entitlements.

“Let me stress, it’s not like a redneck approach. It’s not a group of blokes burning crosses,” the entrepreneur says. “It’s comments along the lines of ‘I don’t give a damn whether they’re Muslim or Christian or Jewish or Hindu, what I do care is that they want to come to our country because they want to be here and assimilate into our culture’. Clearly the government, state or federal, left or right, isn’t putting systems in place to foster that.

Pauline Hanson is more sophisticated now? Yeah, and so are Guns n' Roses | Dom Knight

Read more

“So when someone like Hanson stands up and says, ‘Ban the burqa’ or ‘Reduce immigration’, they’re getting the ticks.”

Two of the group own businesses in Clayfield, one of Brisbane’s dress circle suburbs, where it’s “not unheard of for either of them to have customers leaning over the counter with pro-One Nation talk”, the entrepreneur says.

Analyses of its resurgence in last year’s federal election, which delivered the party four senators including Hanson, have found strongholds of support in rural and regional areas that show signs of economic distress compared with Australian cities.

The Australian has detailed data pointing to “a bleak picture of falling or stagnating wage growth, rising welfare dependence, spikes in crime and plummeting house prices”.

Frank Mols, a political scientist at the University of Queensland who has studied the rise and fall of populist far-right movements, says the data show ample evidence of a link between “hardship and populist voting”.

I've been told to 'go back to my country' my whole life. First in playgrounds, now by Peter Dutton | Antoun Issa

Read more

But Mols argues One Nation’s revival should not be seen primarily as a “working-class revolt”, which in comparable cases such as Donald Trump’s US election victory and Brexit had been shown to be “a myth”.

Instead, Mols predicts One Nation’s surge in popularity will be mostly about a party finding fertile ground among relatively affluent voters.

These are voters with above-average incomes who can afford homes in nice suburbs, overseas holidays and even private-school education.

They are anxious to protect their relative affluence and upward mobility, and can easily become wary of immigrants and minorities “especially if politicians tell them they ought to be fearful of these groups”, he says.

“What you see is populists like Pauline Hanson pointing the finger to what they describe as ‘the leftist urban elite’, and telling middle-class voters that their taxes are being used to subsidise these latte-sipping city dwellers,” Mols says.

“This is a very effective strategy, which has less to do with fear for immigrants or asylum seekers and more to do with envy. So, effectively, they tell lower middle-class voters, ‘They have the lifestyle and you are doing the hard work.’”

How 'alt-right' ideology leaked into mainstream Australian politics – Behind the Lines podcast

Read more

Mols says surges in populist voting don’t require economic downturns to thrive. In fact, they may even spring from economic upswings when the middle class feel pressure to make the most of improving fortunes. Mols says there is good evidence populism thrives on “envy and a sense that others are about to seize what we are entitled to”.

A One Nation source tells Guardian Australia that whenever the party raises the topic of Muslim immigration on social media, engagement is “off the scale”.

The source, who asked not to be named, says he is unaware of party research on supporter demographics. But anecdotal observations by Hanson and her Senate colleagues “on the ground” tell them the “mix of support is extraordinarily complex”.

Mols says he has shared with major party representatives his observations that stereotypes about One Nation voters – older, less educated men in low-income areas – are misleading.

One major party campaigner exhaled an expletive and volunteered “we may have gotten this really wrong” when considering the implications for the election, he says.

An MP from an affluent suburban Brisbane seat also “appeared in shock” when they had a similar conversation.

One donor to the Liberal National party tells Guardian Australia he is aware of several prominent, wealthy Brisbane business figures who will desert the party to vote One Nation.

There’s a big section of the electorate that keeps talking about political correctness gone mad

Paul Williams, Griffith University

An executive from a major stockmarket-listed company will do so, in spite of a personal distaste for Hanson, to protest the LNP abandoning “conservative ideals”, he says.

Other One Nation converts include a tech entrepreneur who has surrendered a long identification with the National party, the LNP donor says.

There are other snapshots of what Mols calls the “counterintuitive” basis of One Nation’s appeal.

A solicitor who runs an inner Brisbane law firm tells Guardian Australia he will consider voting One Nation in part because of Hanson’s communication style.

“She’ll just give it to you straight. I think people appreciate that,” he says.

Despite property searches showing the lawyer holds 18 properties that were collectively worth $1.6m more than a decade ago, he says he doesn’t think of himself as “middle-class” because he is from an immigrant Italian family.

“My father came here and picked up a pick and shovel and worked like a dog and made some dough. That’s the type of immigrants we should still be trying to get.”

Pauline Hanson in the Senate in Canberra. Political scientists say her anti-immigration message plays more effectively for her than her economic plans. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian

Williams says there are two factors that will prompt people “with good jobs and kids in private schools” to vote for Hanson for the first time.

“An anti-Islam sentiment and – this keeps coming up time and again - there’s a big section of the electorate that keeps talking about political correctness gone mad,” he says.

“Hanson’s strength lies in pushing this rather than the economic issues because she knows it’s a generic button: push it and it will resonate in the fringes of Brisbane, in Cairns, in northern New South Wales, you name it. That’s why she’s going hard on Islam more than anyone else.”

Hanson’s rise presents a real problem for established parties in Queensland, as it does everywhere else. The LNP leader, Tim Nicholls, ruled out forming a coalition with One Nation but not a minority government with its support. But in an apparent attempt to highlight the risks of conservative voters ditching the LNP for One Nation, Nicholls said: “Queenslanders know that if they vote for a minor party they will return a do-nothing Labor government.”

If you want a response from the Muslim community, first understand it | Mostafa Rachwani

Read more

Labor is talking about the economy but argues that the overall picture since it took office two years ago is one of recovery. Unemployment, which sat at 6.6% two years ago, is now 6%, which includes a fall in jobless numbers in the hard-hit mining areas of Mackay and Rockhampton. The Queensland treasurer, Curtis Pitt, tells Guardian Australia his government is “not shying away from the problems and we’ve been upfront about the fact south-east Queensland is doing better than other parts of the state”.

“I think people are focusing on whether One Nation has the economic policies that will achieve something.”

When asked if One Nation’s growing support is a sign the government is not cutting through on its economic pitch to voters, Pitt says: “The key message from a range of things that have happened in world politics as well as politics in Australia in recent times is really clear.

“People are very clearly saying they want to be listened to. And, as always, you can have some of the best, most complex policy responses anywhere but it’s all about making sure people understand what you’re doing.”